


Perfect Geometry

by mystivy



Category: Tennis RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 09:08:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28507941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mystivy/pseuds/mystivy
Summary: Mirka watches her husband fall in love with Rafael Nadal.
Relationships: Mirka Federer/Roger Federer, Roger Federer/Rafael Nadal
Comments: 13
Kudos: 61





	Perfect Geometry

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks so much to Aditi for her beautiful feedback <3

Once, when I was maybe five or six, waiting outside ballet class for my mother to come pick me up, I saw a line of ants cross the concrete in front of my shoes. I wore the little white Mary Janes we all wore then, with little white ankle socks, because it was summer. My ballet shoes and my blue practice skirt and leotard were in my backpack, and the sun was shining, and I was sitting on a kerb burst through with dandelions. A girl in my class had told me dandelions made you pee in your pants, so I avoided them. I sat on an unbroken section of the kerb and watched these ants, one after the other, march somewhere for some reason. I edged my shoe towards them and the line moved fluidly around, and I pushed more, and it bent more, without the ants seeming to think about it. I can’t remember what I was thinking myself. I don’t know why I’m remembering it now.

Maybe at times like this we retreat to something safe. I remember the warmth that day, the smell of the concrete. The sound of the main road nearby, though the ballet school was tucked down a little side road, with an empty lot beside it full of nettles and overgrown grass, and some primroses hidden in the shade. Every day, waiting for my mother after ballet class, I thought maybe I could find a way to pick them. I couldn’t, though, not with the nettles.

After Martina said what she did, I stopped going to ballet class. The tennis courts were the other side of town, where there weren’t unkempt lots. There were very pretty flowers outside the clubhouse, but they were the kind you knew, even at nine years old, that you were not supposed to pick. Wisteria grew over the entrance, which made it feel magical to go in. The first time, I tripped a little on the low step because I was too busy looking up and around at the beautiful purple flowers. We have a garden now in Switzerland that I have filled with flowers. I pick them whenever I want.

I know you are not here to read about flowers. You’re here to find out about what you’ve heard. I’ll get to that.

Flowers in Dubai are expensive. I suppose I still noticed the price of things when we first started living there, and once it had registered with me, I kept noticing. There are other things I don’t notice anymore. Don’t ask me what it costs to buy milk, or how much I paid for the cashmere sweater I’m wearing, because I have no idea. Yes, we became that kind of wealthy, the kind where you don’t look at price tags anymore, and someone does your grocery shopping for you. Or if you do find yourself in a shop, you just hand over your card and think about other things when you’re paying at the till. It doesn’t matter. The money is not going to run out. Roger and I have made sure of that. He’s made sure, now, that it will never run out for me, after everything. He knows the role I played. The truth is, I was only okay at ballet. I was a reasonably good tennis player. But I was very, very good at being Mirka Federer.

I saw him first on a day that was one moment cloudy, the next sunny. A bad kind of day for a tennis player, when the light keeps changing and you can be perfectly comfortable lining up for a shot and then you’re suddenly dazzled. That was probably one of the things that was bothering him. He was screaming and having some kind of tantrum. Someone told me that he was the future of tennis and I laughed. I zipped up my jacket and picked up my racket bag and went home. My mother was frying pork and potatoes and I told her about this guy, this gangly kid with acne and a terrible temper who was supposed to be the future of tennis. We laughed and I made a salad and when Papa came home we had dinner and I told him, too. We told Roger all this once, over dinner in one of the restaurants we always go to in Dubai—La Cantine, maybe, or Nobu; I remember wagyu beef—and he laughed and said he would have agreed with us. He said if it wasn’t for me there with him, steadying him, he’d never have done so well. I dispute that, though of course not entirely. It’s partially true.

Early on, when he was twenty years old, we were walking through a little park near where he was living with his parents at the time, sometime in the autumn before the snow. There was a spiderweb in a tree, the most perfect spiderweb I’d ever seen. It was glistening with dew. Look, I said, and we stood there looking at it silently for a minute, marvelling at the symmetry, the geometry, as if it was designed by someone with some kind of computer programme. The spider sat fat and still in the middle. 

“That’s what I want to play,” he said. “Perfect geometry.”

After Peter died he wanted it more. I told him to stop wearing cargo pants and after a while he listened. “You have to be something on court and off,” I told him. “You have to be everything. Own the space.”

So he did. I owned it with him.

He met Gavin sometime in 2006. One morning I woke up later than him, which was rare. I looked for him and found him in the kitchen, a cup of coffee in his hand, staring out at the mountains. There was already snow on some of them. The sun was still low and pale. “I slept with Gavin in New York,” he said. 

“Oh.” He didn’t turn around. I can’t remember what I was thinking, exactly. I numbly made coffee and then thought how stupid that was. I asked him what it meant. “Are we done?”

“No!” He said it with surprise. As if the question was a shock, out of nowhere for him. “I can’t… I need you.”

I sat down at the table. The sun was slanting in and it got in my eyes, but I didn’t move. I knew it would slide past in about ten minutes or so. “So… what, then?”

We had a long talk, until the sun had moved on, yellower in the mid-morning and gone at noon. He told me what he wanted. What things about himself he wanted to get to know. We talked about how we could make space for it between us. A new plan, a new way of doing things. “We don’t need to be normal,” he said. “We can do anything we want. Anything.”

He was right. We were reaching a stratosphere where it felt like normal rules no longer apply. “Does Gwen know?”

“No. I don’t think so. No.”

It was none of my business.

He bought me the ring, then, the diamond one I wore in those days until we got married. He likes to buy me diamonds.

Until now, Roger has been with three men throughout our marriage: Gavin, then Bradley, and a sheikh I won’t name, Dubai being what it is. All the while, I had my husband, and I had our children, and sometimes I had friends of my own, when he was gone. Our children are used to our life, where Papa disappears and comes back for all kinds of reasons, so they don’t notice when those disappearances are nothing to do with tennis or sponsors. All they know is that Papa always comes back to us. To me. I still have him, too.

Well. I had.

I know his eyes when he is in love. I know he looked at me with those eyes, not at Gavin or Bradley or his Dubai prince. Gavin was a fling, someone who made Roger giddy and sent him back to me loose and carnal. Bradley was a friend, someone Roger went on bike rides with, someone he hung out with and had sex with. Roger came back from him with a kind of quiet satisfaction. The sheikh made him mad with desire, made him lose his mind sometimes, wide-eyed with anticipation. When I saw him again, usually days later, he’d be imprinted with a prince’s hands and mouth, limp as a rag doll, and grinning with all his teeth showing. Sometimes he had to wear wristbands for days until the bruises faded.

But none of it was love. 

It worked for us, him and me. I whispered in his ear to tell me what the sheikh did to him, and he told me. He asked if I wanted to watch, and I loved him for asking, but I said no. I wanted to hear him tell it. I wanted to trace my hands over his skin and imagine how each mark got there. I wanted to find him again each time he came back to me. He wanted to be found.

No, with these other men, it wasn’t love. Love came slowly stealing in between us. Like dye creeps up the stems of roses, turning pink into vivid purple, it crept into my husband’s veins. In our bedroom early one evening, after the sun had gone down but the curtains were still open and I was looking out across the darkening lake, he said to me that he wanted to do anything he could to help Rafa open his Academy.

“You mean an exhibition or something?”

“Maybe. Whatever he wants.”

Over breakfast, sometime during those strange mornings between Christmas and the New Year that drift by, when upstairs our things were being packed for Australia, he told me he couldn’t wait for the Laver Cup, he couldn’t wait to play with Rafa. Months later, after Prague, he was high. “Did you sleep with him?” I asked. He had stopped seeing his sheikh by then. I was waiting for the next one.

“No, I didn’t,” he said. Half defensive, half cagey. Myla ran into the room to show us a drawing she’d done of her favourite place on earth. It was of her in skis on the side of a mountain.

Later, with his arms around me, he whispered in the dark. _I don’t need those guys. I’m letting go of all of that. I need to be with one person._

I think he was speaking to himself.

I stuffed Lenny’s books into his backpack after the Hopman Cup so he’d have them in the plane to Melbourne. Roger held up a tablet with a blue camo cover. “Leo’s,” I told him. He put it in the other backpack. He cleared his throat and said, “I want to invest in Rafa’s Academy. Seriously invest. Maybe even some kind of partnership.”

I knew he was enamoured of it. I zipped Lenny’s backpack shut. “Okay,” I said. “It seems like an amazing project.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It really does.”

“Rafa has finally agreed to a date,” he told me another time. We were in Dubai, on the balcony. Lenny had my phone and he was taking photos of two pigeons that had landed on the very edge of the balcony, outside the glass barrier. There was a breeze that day, the kind that comes in from the north and cools everything down just a little.

“Oh yes?” I asked. I had coffee in my hands. We’d made love that morning and I could still feel it between my legs.

“Yeah,” he said. “At last. February next year.”

I watched them in Geneva. Rafa was still oblivious then, I think, but it started to dawn on me. I saw my husband’s face gazing at him and dread crept from the nape of my neck. I saw my husband bury his face in Rafa’s shoulder, arms around him, as if they were already lovers.

Roger’s hair still smelled of champagne when I asked him again: “Did you sleep with him?”

A pause this time. A shift in bed, as he turned back to look at me. “No. You’ve asked me that before.”

“Will you sleep with him?”

He punched the pillow, lay facing away from me. “No,” he said. “I’m done with that, Mirka. It’s been years.”

Another pause.

“If I do, I’ll tell you.”

The day before Rafa married Mery, Roger told a newspaper he wanted to teach at Rafa’s Academy when he retired. The day of the wedding, he was silent, surly. Myla and Charlene had watched a movie about a man who fell in love with a mermaid and they were eating yoghurts in the kitchen and telling us the entire story. It sounded familiar. They told us the man ends up living in the sea with his mermaid, as if this was a happy ending. It seemed to me a terrible thing, to be stranded in the dark and the cold, far from home.

“No, Mama, he _wanted_ to go,” Charlene told me. Myla was nodding.

“Still,” I said, though I had no real point to make.

Severin and Ivan came and we all had dinner together. Roger checked his phone now and then, though it seemed he never saw what he wanted to see there. After dinner, he talked strategy heading into Basel with Ivan and Severin while I ushered the boys upstairs with Nina to get ready for bed. Myla and Charlene were huddled over a notebook in the living room, writing a story about the man and the mermaid. I closed the curtains against the dark. 

Most of us, if we’re lucky, watch our husbands fall in love only once, and we watch it through eyes also saturated with new love. He fell for me quickly. His eyes lit up every time he saw me in Sydney, and after that he never lost it. After we got married, I could hear the thrill in his voice when he called me his wife. He never lost that, either, even now. I’ll miss it.

I felt him drift from me in Australia, and then something snapped in Cape Town. I didn’t lose him there in the arena, in front of fifty-one thousand people, the air reverberating with noise for him and for Rafa. No, it was before that, or after. A quiet moment here and there. There are photos of us together on the court they built for him and he looks happy but I can’t see happiness in me. Perhaps a little. Each moment, happiness drained from me. How can I describe the certainty I felt that day, the certainty that I was losing him? Rafa told us he’d bought an apartment in Dubai. Roger’s eyes shone. 

He sat in the hotel room on the edge of the bed after Rafa had gone, staring at his phone. He was flicking through photographs he found online. I realised that the look on his face, the almost beatific kind of happiness, the soul-deep contentment, meant he was looking at pictures of him and Rafa. He looked up and his face clouded a little. He didn’t mean it.

“Please don’t ask,” he said, after a moment.

“Ask what?”

“If I’ve slept with him. I told you I’d tell you if I did.”

He stood up, his phone stuffed in his pocket. I walked towards him. I held his face in my hands. His jaws fit perfectly in my palms. I stroked my thumbs over his evening stubble and softly kissed his mouth. “I don’t think that’s the question anymore.”

“Mirka,” he said, taking one of my hands in his. His voice was choked. He didn’t know what else to say.

Bill told us in Cape Town what was coming, and I struggled to believe him. It sounded like science fiction. But he was right. The news became like the news clips you see in the exposition of a sci-fi movie, talking about _the virus_. Roger was uncompromising when it came to our safety, and that of his parents and mine. We had lots of space. It was easy for us to stay at home, stay isolated, and keep ourselves relatively well occupied. How many people get to isolate with their own pool and gym? 

Though so many people lost so much, all of it gave me one thing I am grateful for: it gave me nine more months with my husband. It gave us time to say goodbye.

His knee was still bandaged from surgery. One night, Lenny couldn’t sleep, plagued with fear. Roger sat on his bed and held him, rocking him and murmuring to him, assuring him that he was safe, and his family was safe. I could barely contain my grief that our little boy was so scared. Leo kissed my cheek and the girls came in and we sat and talked for over an hour. I loved us all so fiercely that night. Later, Roger put his arms around me and pressed his face into my shoulder blades. I lay awake for a long time after he fell asleep. A few days later, when the girls wanted to bake banana bread, their father, who had never baked before in his life, put on an apron and helped them with the recipe. He sat on one of the stools from the breakfast bar, taking the weight off his knee, and talked them through it step by step. I sat in the living room watching them, pretending to read. I didn’t fool him, though. He looked over at me and smiled, just as he always has.

Sometimes he disappeared. I’d hear him, his voice echoing from somewhere in the house or somewhere outside in the snow, wrapped up in a coat and scarf and hat. I could hear the warmth in his voice that these days is only there for Rafa. How I came to resent Rafa. I know it’s foolish. I feel foolish, saying these things. I feel petty. Like every wife left who resents the rival rather than the one who does the leaving. But it’s easier, isn’t it? I’ve spent twenty years loving Roger. I can’t turn it off. Much easier to be angry at the man who’s taking him away.

Roger stayed while things were bad, and he kept staying. He had the second surgery on his knee and came home to me. He started to train again, and he watched New York, wishing he could have been there. Then he watched Paris almost furtively, as if I didn’t know who he was watching. “It’s okay,” I said to him, when he pretended to half-heartedly turn on the semifinal. “I know.”

I didn’t stay. 

And then, one day, nor did he.

The kids were downstairs in the pool, so the kitchen was quiet when he came in. “Mirka,” he said, and that cold fear stretched up from the nape of my neck again. “I’m going to go, I think, for a little while. If it’s okay.”

I closed the dishwasher slowly. Usually I’d shut it before I’d even thought about it, but I wanted time to stretch out after he said those words. Travel was opening up again, things were getting a little more manageable. I’d known this day was coming. “Go to Mallorca?”

“Yeah.” He stood with his hands on the counter of the island, spreading out his fingers, as if he was grounding himself. 

I folded a dishtowel that had already been folded. “I wish this was like the other ones,” I said to him. “I could take it then.”

“You know I didn’t—”

“I know.”

Silence, drawn out. His phone buzzed but he ignored it. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said. He sounded as if his chest was tight.

I put the towel down and stood the other side of the island, opposite him. “You’re in love with him. He’s in love with you. You’ll leave me, he’ll leave his wife, and you’ll be together.”

He looked furtive, almost. “I should be the one saying that,” he said. “I should be the one telling you. Not making you tell me.”

When someone’s face is familiar, you don’t see it anymore, but I saw him now. His dark eyes, those were the first thing I found attractive about him. I love how deep they are, how low his eyebrows are. They give him an air of mystery, a man who plays his cards close to his chest. His strong chin, the flatness of his lower lip, his downturned nose. The sweep of his lush hair, his widow’s peak. “My Roger,” I said, almost to myself. There were tears in his eyes but he wouldn’t let himself cry. I was glad about that. It would have made me furious, and I didn’t want this moment to be angry. There was plenty of time for that. “I’m not going to give you permission. Whatever you do, you do it alone.”

He nodded, rubbing at his nose. “Okay.” He smiled a kind of sad, watery smile. “It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything really alone.”

“Me too,” I said. 

That night he came to bed as usual and held me while I silently cried.

And now you know what you know. For the last two weeks it seems the world has been abuzz with photos of him practising at the Rafa Nadal Academy. I didn’t want to know, but some things it’s hard to look away from. It was all over Instagram, Twitter, even Facebook. I saw how they looked at each other and I couldn’t understand how anyone could miss it. How can anyone fail to see they’re in love? Nevertheless, I thought the world would go on, oblivious, as it has for a long time.

Not this time. Now there are whispers, rumours. Federer is not staying in Nadal’s hotel, they said, at first. Then, every morning Federer arrives with Nadal in his car. A clip on Twitter, an unknown voice behind a phone: _Where are you staying, Roger?_ Roger’s smile, straight into the camera. “With Rafa.” Photos of them together at a bar in Manacor, photos of them on some street, Rafa in a puffy winter jacket, Roger in a gilet he got from Uniqlo. Every picture turns my blood to vinegar. The winter is creeping down the mountains towards our home and he tells me he’ll be back for Christmas. We will never have it again, though. Never again will we live in this place we built and be happy.

I’m tired these days. My children ask me, Mama, what’s wrong? They can see into me. I sit with them on the deck, wrapped up in our warm clothes, with hot chocolate in our hands while we watch the winter come. Myla can’t wait to ski. Charlene wants to skate. The boys are planning an elaborate snow fort for the middle of the garden. The clouds are heavy above us, and then they start to fall, the tiny snowflakes. The kids get up and dance in them, calling out to the sky. I sit on the step, my feet on the ground, and I watch them accumulate around my boots. They’re still such tiny, fragile things. The first powder of the season. I scuff them with my boot and, just for a moment, they’re gone.


End file.
